[antman68]

Thanks wrx.

My thoughts on your suggestions:

• So Minix and Wetec are the only manufacturers of non-proprietary Android boxes who are sponsors? I had hoped that there would be more.
  
  
• Deinterlacing - I doubt that my aging eyes would be able to see poor deinterlacing on a 36" screen from 5m away. I doubt my wife would care. It would be different if we were watching something on the big screen in the living room but, for the bedroom TV, ease of use and stability are far more important than outright picture quality. I don't have any exotic file formats to play either - mainly mpeg2, mp4, flv and mkv. Just thinking 'out loud': if the recorded TV is streamed from a Win 7 machine with an okay-ish (for about 4-5 years ago) graphics card (ATI Radeon HD5450) can it deinterlace on the fly as it streams?
  
  
• playback of ripped DVDs in .vob format is a bigger issue but I have a couple of months before this unit would be pressed into service so I have time to convert them to H.264 MKV format. This would liberate some disk space too so it would be win-win really.
  
  
• I am thinking about using a Bluetooth air mouse/remote with a keyboard on the reverse side. I know that these aren't the best for text entry (I used to use a Dinovo Mini with an HTPC a few years ago) but should be fine for limited use. We can always use one of the wireless keyboards we have floating around for set up and maintenance.
  
  
• This unit is for a new house we have bought in country NSW (in a regional city). In fact the wife and ankle-biters are already there; I have a bit of work to finish up in Perth so I'm racking up the frequent flyer points in the meantime and moving over permanently in the new year. All of the internal walls in the new house are plasterboard so the wifi signal is strong everywhere. The house has extensive Cat6 wiring but there is no network point near the bedroom TV (it's on the other side of the room) so aesthetics dictate that wifi handles the networking. The wireless router is the standard iiNet ADSL modem/router that they give you with a new connection and is 2.4GHz only. Out the back of the house, across a paddock (not ours), I can connect from 100m or more away; in the other direction, where there are houses on 1/4 acre blocks down the street with all of their wifi networks competing, I can connect from about 50m away so it's a good strong signal from the router. The bedroom TV is upstairs almost directly above the router about 4m below so I have no concerns over getting a 2.4GHz connection. However, I am planning on re-purposing a dual band modem/router that I am currently using in Perth as an additional AP plugged into an upstairs centrally-located network point to service the bedrooms, all of which are upstairs. I anticipate that most of the network access upstairs will be to access media so I want to take advantage of the 5GHz band for the higher speed. I am sure that I will have some hand over issues between the upstairs and downstairs APs with mobile devices but fixed devices should be fine.
  
  
• Because I won't be physically around much over the next few months for support, I want to stay away from OS's and hardware with which I am not familiar (and moreso that the rest of the family are not familiar with). That rules out Linux and Chrome OS for now; even though I am sure that the learning curve isn't very steep, I'd prefer no learning curve for now. A Win. box seems like overkill in terms of $$$ and processing/memory requirements and I don't plan to go anywhere near AppleTV, even though iOS devices narrowly outnumber Android devices in the household. This same consideration rules out a RPi2.
  
  
• The Tronsmart Ara X5 looks tasty but seems a bit over the top for my current needs plus over my budget. Tronsmart isn't a sponsor, is it? Thanks also for the offers of the ODROID and the Chromecast but I think I'm going to go with Android this time around.
  

So, what's the best value for money, US$120 max., dual-band wifi, Android box (or stick - I'm interested in sticks because they are easily hidden away) with acceptable, but not necessarily cutting edge, graphics and, preferably, made by a Kodi sponsor or at least with good, stable, supported firmware (KK or Lollipop)?